Linda Faillace Discusses NAIS By Monica @ 7:56 PM
NAIS is not going to assure consumer confidence in the meat supply, but that is how it is being sold to the American public. In fact, the USDA has actively blocked independent testing of mad cow disease by Creekstone Farms, and the levels of testing that the USDA carries out are woefully inadequate: less than a tenth of a percent. With three cows discovered so far, that level of testing is simply not going to be effective at discovering the disease, and the USDA knows it. It has admitted a concern that more testing will "undermine confidence in the meat supply." We're going to have to keep a close eye on the Obama administration when it comes to the NAIS issue. It's simply a mechanism for more control over our food supply. The safety and terrorism issues are a complete smokescreen.
In Linda Faillace's book Mad Sheep, she issued a very strong verdict against the USDA, saying that it needs to be completely dismantled and restructured. I give the book my highest recommendation and wrote a review of it here.
Of course I oppose the USDA and of course it's so very wrong to stop companies from testing more cows, but my understanding from the graduate biology and medical schools at the University of Chicago is that mad cow really isn't anything for human meat consumers to worry about. Protein synthesis is very, very precise, and the idea that an already mutated protein from a COW would ALSO fit into protein receptors in the human brain AND be replicated AND cause encephalitis is just absurd. Yes, the protein originated in sheep and spread to cows, but the similarities in protein receptors between cows and sheep are far more than between cows and humans. No human has ever been proven to have contracted mad cow. The mad cow alarmists of course just claim that we've misdiagnosed other diseases so possibly countless of people dying of diseases like alzheimer's actually died of mad cow. Meanwhile plastic alarmists claim that these alzheimer's patients were poisoned by tupperware, and religious crazies say it's all the hand of God.
If some clever business man can find a way to test every cow without charging me more for my beef, of course I will buy from them. But the marginal increase in safety is so miniscule, I wouldn't even pay 50 cents more for additional testing.
There are a lot of reasons why prion diseases aren't terribly prevalent in humans, primarily that we don't eat our dead. You are more likely to self-generate a new prion disease than you are to contract one as a non-cannibalistic human.
Unfortunately being out of college for about a year now, I don't have access to all of the latest medical journals, but last time I checked (and just now with what resources are available to me for free), there isn't even confirmation that Creutzfeldt-Jakob's is cause by a prion, although it probably is since viruses and bacteria are easier to detect and it is contagious (if you take a bath in infected spinal fluid or eat an infected brain) and thus is not a congenital condition.
Given that we have identified the mad cow/scrapies prion, I very much doubt we would be unable to positively verify that CJ is cause by the same protein, but I could be wrong. In any case, while some people claim (as they always do) that the agent that causes CJ is somehow being transmitted through the meat supply, there is no proof, and no significant evidence even leaning in that direction that I've seen. It strikes me as extremely unlikely that meat poses much of a risk since the agent doesn't appear to be transmitted through contact with blood from an infected human (although this isn't yet conclusively proven).
Of course I could be wrong, but it sounds a lot like another Silent Spring to me, only this time with even less evidence.
Doing a short literature search I'm seeing what you're saying.
Still, sounds fishy to me. In Britain, where feeding of bone meal used to be much more prevalent before 1996, over 150 people have died of CJD. Why is that? Correlation, not causation, but still, the number of CJD cases have continued to decline in the UK after the bone meal feeding ban. Those feeding techniques aren't common in the United States. Doesn't mean they're not happening, but they're not nearly as prevalent due to the abundance of herbaceous material as fodder.
Blood transfusions are a possibility but it still doesn't tell us about the origin of the prion. Just tells us it can be transmitted from human to human. And it even seems possible to come down with the disease without even eating prions (it appears as if it's a mutation in the same spot as the mutation in the protein that causes BSE) but those non-infectious cases appear to be only around 5-10% of CJD cases.
I see BSE has been transmitted to monkeys orally. Same for mice. Doesn't mean a whole lot because it's a deliberate infection experiment. Still, the species barrier can be crossed by feeding the brain material. Of course, the only way to prove that BSE can be transmitted from cows to humans and causes CJD is to feed humans prions from diseased cows in an experiment, which is of course unethical. Therefore, it's never likely to be proved as such and animal models are our best choice.
In support of the hypothesis that CJD is of human origin, though, I found this interesting abstract:
And in just a quick Medline search I'm seeing a couple of papers indicating the BSE could be caused by a bacterium. Very interesting. (I haven't read these papers so I really don't know whether the work is good.)
Seems like a bit of a long shot but you never know. In short, it certainly seems possible that CJD could be of human origin or other origin besides cows, but that doesn't mean cows aren't now implicated in the transmission. In fact, whatever the origin of the disease, that does seem like the most parsimonious explanation to me given Britain's experience. In any case, there are many people who would pay $.20 more per pound for a verification that the source animal didn't have BSE. Even though that may turn out to be illogical, people make all kinds of illogical purchases all the time (antibacterial hand cleaners are a big pet peeve of mine). That doesn't mean they shouldn't have the right. It seems especially prudent given the uncertainty in the literature.
I see, though, that the actual medical situation is more complicated than typical media reports, so thanks for chiming in.
I guess my biggest beef (no pun intended!) with this situation is that the USDA is impeding progress. If every cow in this particular facility was tested, imagine what we might be able to learn about the epidemiology of BSE just in cows, and the different mutations is the prion proteins in comparison to Europe, assuming we found some. But no, we can't have that. We can't have science or progress because the American public is too dumb to understand it all and it's the USDA's job to inspire "confidence" in the beef industry.
$.20 per pound is the estimated cost. And considering that people pay anywhere from $2.50 to $15.00 for beef per pound normally, that's between a 1 to a 10 percent markup.
I don't really eat feedlot beef much anymore, but it still bugs me, that's all. Here's a private entity high end meat packer that wants to improve quality yet the USDA blocks it, and instead is foisting a million dollar trace back program on farmers that isn't even useful at preventing ANY disease. All it will do is give big producers greater access to the export market. It's especially not going to be useful when meat packing plants are mixing meat from Mexico, Canada, and the US. It really goes to show you whose side the USDA is on.
Discussions like this make me want to be a molecular biologist like you would not believe.
Darn those ethical limitations that prevent us from infecting humans with deadly diseases (kidding). It's interesting though, science gained some very useful and otherwise undiscoverable (at least currently) data on stuff like human survival rates in water at various temperatures from the National Socialists who experimented on "undesirables" to obtain the information. What we really need are the equivalent of crash dummies in medicine.
It absolutely sucks that while the government is supposedly insuring that everyone is informed about their food via nutrition info and warning labels, they are actually blocking the flow of information to consumers. Thanks for keeping us informed of the myriad ways government screws this up!
It would be so interesting to research this. As for the correlation with bone meal usage, I'd be interested to look at other counties where the disease is prevalent and analyze some of their trends to try and isolate a common factor. There are undoubtedly many things special about England besides their meat supply. Since the disease is so difficult to spread, it could just be that as they got better at identifying it in humans, they also got better at containing it, and the disease basically died out. It could have been coincidence that this happened around the same time as the bone meal ban. Or maybe not.
One of the major studies that lead to the disastrous US ban of DDT showed that the Peregrine Falcon population declined in a particular part of Canada along with the increase of DDT in their main food source. However when Peregrine Falcon populations were studied in other parts of Canada and in the US, they found that populations were growing in areas with even more DDT. The rational scientists concluded that DDT was irrelevant to Peregrine Falcon population growth, but by then the media and politicians had run away with it and now millions are dead from malaria. In my experience, many scientists aren't even aware that the popular view of DDT is erroneous. Science acquitted DDT regarding egg shell thinning in the 1970's for Christ's sake, but ask the educated man on the street or even scientist on the street and they'll tell you DDT was rightfully banned because it killed birds. Meanwhile millions of public and private monies go to the cool "(red)" disease, AIDS/HIV, that we -can't- cure and that kills far fewer than the one was can not only cure but prevent entirely. Not that the West has an obligation to take care of Africa, but as long as we're doing it, shouldn't we at least do it right?
This may seem off-topic, but I'm trying to illustrate the potentially disastrous effects of phony science. I'd hate to see the same thing happen to meat. Say we start insisting the Massai test their cows before drinking their blood or else no funding? Then they switch to Western diets and start getting diabetes and heart disease and all that fun stuff. And in fifty years we're funneling our money into curing diseases for which the cause could have been avoided in the first place.
Stopping the government funding of course would help, but a lot of private money goes too. That money should be spent wisely.
Most of the danger for developing countries is that they're being pushed off their native foods as subsidized grains flood their markets, because they don't subsidize their farmers. We don't need to feed the world with grains. They should take care of themselves. Almost every human needs meat in their diet. They need a regional system of meat production and to be self-sufficient to the greatest extent possible.
As for DDT, I agree that the danger is overblown, and it is not as related to eggshell thinning as previously thought. I also don't believe there is any evidence that DDT causes cancer. However, there are a number of myths about Silent Spring. I find that most people complaining about the book have never read it nor do they know what her recommendations were as to DDT usage. Rachel Carson was not an evil, anti-life person, in my opinion. I'm sure many would disagree with me, but I don't believe the case is there.
I do believe there is some evidence that DDT and DDE are endocrine disruptors. As for the one historical example where DDT residues seem linked to tremendous health problems (the Aral Sea elimination due to Soviet farming practices), there are confounding variables such as heavy metal pollution.
The DDT issue is really a red herring, though. It's only outlawed for agricultural use, not any kind of disease epidemic, even in the United States. I always ask people to come up with any evidence that DDT is actually banned by governments overseas for malarial use. To my knowledge only 2 countries have experimented with a total ban on DDT (South Africa for one, Ecuador might be another). I believe both of these countries have rescinded the bans. Over $1 billion in public funds from the US goes toward indoor spraying of DDT in tropical Africa each year. We stopped funding public spraying programs in Africa at least half a decade before it was banned for agricultural use in the United States, and it was because resistance was emerging and it became clear to the US government that the malaria problem wasn't going to be solved by spraying.
I think the indoor use of DDT is appropriate. Let people do what they want on their own properties (in fact that is what is going on now, funded with US aid). I don't think that the outdoor spraying was ultimately going to be effective, and indeed it led to widespread resistance in parts of India as early as the 50s. There are multiple known mechanisms of resistance to DDT documented in the scientific literature. DDT isn't an ultimate answer to malaria, and junkscience.com, which claims it was and that Rachel Carson has millions of deaths on her hands, is itself junk science, not to mention completely irresponsible reporting.
Biotechnology to eliminate various species of mosquitoes (Bill Gates) would be very helpful. The main problem in Africa is that it's a tropical environment very conducive to fostering mosquito populations. DDT, bednets, etc. are just a bandaid. We eliminated malaria here in the west by draining wetlands. Ultimately, Africa needs development and proper land management. The fact is that these countries are so piss poor they can't even afford any type of massive government-supported spraying program -- let alone the fact that it's not the government's job to carry out such public health campaigns anyway.
8 Comments:
Of course I oppose the USDA and of course it's so very wrong to stop companies from testing more cows, but my understanding from the graduate biology and medical schools at the University of Chicago is that mad cow really isn't anything for human meat consumers to worry about. Protein synthesis is very, very precise, and the idea that an already mutated protein from a COW would ALSO fit into protein receptors in the human brain AND be replicated AND cause encephalitis is just absurd. Yes, the protein originated in sheep and spread to cows, but the similarities in protein receptors between cows and sheep are far more than between cows and humans. No human has ever been proven to have contracted mad cow. The mad cow alarmists of course just claim that we've misdiagnosed other diseases so possibly countless of people dying of diseases like alzheimer's actually died of mad cow. Meanwhile plastic alarmists claim that these alzheimer's patients were poisoned by tupperware, and religious crazies say it's all the hand of God.
If some clever business man can find a way to test every cow without charging me more for my beef, of course I will buy from them. But the marginal increase in safety is so miniscule, I wouldn't even pay 50 cents more for additional testing.
There are a lot of reasons why prion diseases aren't terribly prevalent in humans, primarily that we don't eat our dead. You are more likely to self-generate a new prion disease than you are to contract one as a non-cannibalistic human.
"No human has ever been proven to have contracted mad cow."
Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease? Over 100 people dead from it in Britain?
Unfortunately being out of college for about a year now, I don't have access to all of the latest medical journals, but last time I checked (and just now with what resources are available to me for free), there isn't even confirmation that Creutzfeldt-Jakob's is cause by a prion, although it probably is since viruses and bacteria are easier to detect and it is contagious (if you take a bath in infected spinal fluid or eat an infected brain) and thus is not a congenital condition.
Given that we have identified the mad cow/scrapies prion, I very much doubt we would be unable to positively verify that CJ is cause by the same protein, but I could be wrong. In any case, while some people claim (as they always do) that the agent that causes CJ is somehow being transmitted through the meat supply, there is no proof, and no significant evidence even leaning in that direction that I've seen. It strikes me as extremely unlikely that meat poses much of a risk since the agent doesn't appear to be transmitted through contact with blood from an infected human (although this isn't yet conclusively proven).
Of course I could be wrong, but it sounds a lot like another Silent Spring to me, only this time with even less evidence.
Doing a short literature search I'm seeing what you're saying.
Still, sounds fishy to me. In Britain, where feeding of bone meal used to be much more prevalent before 1996, over 150 people have died of CJD. Why is that? Correlation, not causation, but still, the number of CJD cases have continued to decline in the UK after the bone meal feeding ban. Those feeding techniques aren't common in the United States. Doesn't mean they're not happening, but they're not nearly as prevalent due to the abundance of herbaceous material as fodder.
Blood transfusions are a possibility but it still doesn't tell us about the origin of the prion. Just tells us it can be transmitted from human to human. And it even seems possible to come down with the disease without even eating prions (it appears as if it's a mutation in the same spot as the mutation in the protein that causes BSE) but those non-infectious cases appear to be only around 5-10% of CJD cases.
I see BSE has been transmitted to monkeys orally. Same for mice. Doesn't mean a whole lot because it's a deliberate infection experiment. Still, the species barrier can be crossed by feeding the brain material. Of course, the only way to prove that BSE can be transmitted from cows to humans and causes CJD is to feed humans prions from diseased cows in an experiment, which is of course unethical. Therefore, it's never likely to be proved as such and animal models are our best choice.
In support of the hypothesis that CJD is of human origin, though, I found this interesting abstract:
http://newfirstsearch.oclc.org.libezproxy2.syr.edu/WebZ/FSFETCH?fetchtype=fullrecord:sessionid=fsapp10-55567-fppxt8qz-2nxrt8:entitypagenum=70:0:recno=98:resultset=2:format=FI:next=html/record.html:bad=error/badfetch.html:entitytoprecno=98:entitycurrecno=98:numrecs=1
And in just a quick Medline search I'm seeing a couple of papers indicating the BSE could be caused by a bacterium. Very interesting. (I haven't read these papers so I really don't know whether the work is good.)
Seems like a bit of a long shot but you never know. In short, it certainly seems possible that CJD could be of human origin or other origin besides cows, but that doesn't mean cows aren't now implicated in the transmission. In fact, whatever the origin of the disease, that does seem like the most parsimonious explanation to me given Britain's experience. In any case, there are many people who would pay $.20 more per pound for a verification that the source animal didn't have BSE. Even though that may turn out to be illogical, people make all kinds of illogical purchases all the time (antibacterial hand cleaners are a big pet peeve of mine). That doesn't mean they shouldn't have the right. It seems especially prudent given the uncertainty in the literature.
I see, though, that the actual medical situation is more complicated than typical media reports, so thanks for chiming in.
I guess my biggest beef (no pun intended!) with this situation is that the USDA is impeding progress. If every cow in this particular facility was tested, imagine what we might be able to learn about the epidemiology of BSE just in cows, and the different mutations is the prion proteins in comparison to Europe, assuming we found some. But no, we can't have that. We can't have science or progress because the American public is too dumb to understand it all and it's the USDA's job to inspire "confidence" in the beef industry.
$.20 per pound is the estimated cost. And considering that people pay anywhere from $2.50 to $15.00 for beef per pound normally, that's between a 1 to a 10 percent markup.
I don't really eat feedlot beef much anymore, but it still bugs me, that's all. Here's a private entity high end meat packer that wants to improve quality yet the USDA blocks it, and instead is foisting a million dollar trace back program on farmers that isn't even useful at preventing ANY disease. All it will do is give big producers greater access to the export market. It's especially not going to be useful when meat packing plants are mixing meat from Mexico, Canada, and the US. It really goes to show you whose side the USDA is on.
Bureaucracy in action.
Discussions like this make me want to be a molecular biologist like you would not believe.
Darn those ethical limitations that prevent us from infecting humans with deadly diseases (kidding). It's interesting though, science gained some very useful and otherwise undiscoverable (at least currently) data on stuff like human survival rates in water at various temperatures from the National Socialists who experimented on "undesirables" to obtain the information. What we really need are the equivalent of crash dummies in medicine.
It absolutely sucks that while the government is supposedly insuring that everyone is informed about their food via nutrition info and warning labels, they are actually blocking the flow of information to consumers. Thanks for keeping us informed of the myriad ways government screws this up!
It would be so interesting to research this. As for the correlation with bone meal usage, I'd be interested to look at other counties where the disease is prevalent and analyze some of their trends to try and isolate a common factor. There are undoubtedly many things special about England besides their meat supply. Since the disease is so difficult to spread, it could just be that as they got better at identifying it in humans, they also got better at containing it, and the disease basically died out. It could have been coincidence that this happened around the same time as the bone meal ban. Or maybe not.
One of the major studies that lead to the disastrous US ban of DDT showed that the Peregrine Falcon population declined in a particular part of Canada along with the increase of DDT in their main food source. However when Peregrine Falcon populations were studied in other parts of Canada and in the US, they found that populations were growing in areas with even more DDT. The rational scientists concluded that DDT was irrelevant to Peregrine Falcon population growth, but by then the media and politicians had run away with it and now millions are dead from malaria. In my experience, many scientists aren't even aware that the popular view of DDT is erroneous. Science acquitted DDT regarding egg shell thinning in the 1970's for Christ's sake, but ask the educated man on the street or even scientist on the street and they'll tell you DDT was rightfully banned because it killed birds. Meanwhile millions of public and private monies go to the cool "(red)" disease, AIDS/HIV, that we -can't- cure and that kills far fewer than the one was can not only cure but prevent entirely. Not that the West has an obligation to take care of Africa, but as long as we're doing it, shouldn't we at least do it right?
This may seem off-topic, but I'm trying to illustrate the potentially disastrous effects of phony science. I'd hate to see the same thing happen to meat. Say we start insisting the Massai test their cows before drinking their blood or else no funding? Then they switch to Western diets and start getting diabetes and heart disease and all that fun stuff. And in fifty years we're funneling our money into curing diseases for which the cause could have been avoided in the first place.
Stopping the government funding of course would help, but a lot of private money goes too. That money should be spent wisely.
Agreed.
Most of the danger for developing countries is that they're being pushed off their native foods as subsidized grains flood their markets, because they don't subsidize their farmers. We don't need to feed the world with grains. They should take care of themselves. Almost every human needs meat in their diet. They need a regional system of meat production and to be self-sufficient to the greatest extent possible.
As for DDT, I agree that the danger is overblown, and it is not as related to eggshell thinning as previously thought. I also don't believe there is any evidence that DDT causes cancer. However, there are a number of myths about Silent Spring. I find that most people complaining about the book have never read it nor do they know what her recommendations were as to DDT usage. Rachel Carson was not an evil, anti-life person, in my opinion. I'm sure many would disagree with me, but I don't believe the case is there.
I do believe there is some evidence that DDT and DDE are endocrine disruptors. As for the one historical example where DDT residues seem linked to tremendous health problems (the Aral Sea elimination due to Soviet farming practices), there are confounding variables such as heavy metal pollution.
The DDT issue is really a red herring, though. It's only outlawed for agricultural use, not any kind of disease epidemic, even in the United States. I always ask people to come up with any evidence that DDT is actually banned by governments overseas for malarial use. To my knowledge only 2 countries have experimented with a total ban on DDT (South Africa for one, Ecuador might be another). I believe both of these countries have rescinded the bans. Over $1 billion in public funds from the US goes toward indoor spraying of DDT in tropical Africa each year. We stopped funding public spraying programs in Africa at least half a decade before it was banned for agricultural use in the United States, and it was because resistance was emerging and it became clear to the US government that the malaria problem wasn't going to be solved by spraying.
I think the indoor use of DDT is appropriate. Let people do what they want on their own properties (in fact that is what is going on now, funded with US aid). I don't think that the outdoor spraying was ultimately going to be effective, and indeed it led to widespread resistance in parts of India as early as the 50s. There are multiple known mechanisms of resistance to DDT documented in the scientific literature. DDT isn't an ultimate answer to malaria, and junkscience.com, which claims it was and that Rachel Carson has millions of deaths on her hands, is itself junk science, not to mention completely irresponsible reporting.
Biotechnology to eliminate various species of mosquitoes (Bill Gates) would be very helpful. The main problem in Africa is that it's a tropical environment very conducive to fostering mosquito populations. DDT, bednets, etc. are just a bandaid. We eliminated malaria here in the west by draining wetlands. Ultimately, Africa needs development and proper land management. The fact is that these countries are so piss poor they can't even afford any type of massive government-supported spraying program -- let alone the fact that it's not the government's job to carry out such public health campaigns anyway.
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